Fleeing Rohingya Muslims watch as homes burn in Myanmar
Groups of fleeing Rohingya Muslims watched from inside Bangladesh on Friday as another of the homes in their abandoned village across the border in Myanmar went up in flames.
The villagers said they'd escaped days ago, crossing into Bangladesh at the border point of Tumbru and joining thousands of other ethnic Rohingya huddling in the open in the district of Bandarban to escape recent violence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
Flames could be seen only about 500 meters (yards) from the border fence.
"You see this fire today, that is my village," said Farid Alam, one of the Rohingya.
When they crossed the border into Bangladesh, they saw land mines that had been newly planted by Myanmar forces, he said.
Thousands of Rohingya are continuing to stream across the border, with U.N. officials and others demanding that Myanmar halt what they describe as a campaign of ethnic cleansing that has driven nearly 400,000 Rohingya to flee in the past three weeks.
That number includes an estimated 240,000 children, UNICEF said in Geneva on Friday.
"We had a big house, we are 10 people in the family, but they burned our home," Alam said as he watched another house burning Friday. "My father was a village doctor, we had a medical store. We had land and cattle, all are gone."
